NOTE: LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’slatest pieceon the mighty Pajamas Media megablog details the horrific crackdown by the Kremlin on opposition attorney Alexei Navalny, including DDOS on his website, outing of his donors by the FSB to Nashi and now a criminal indictment. Is he the next Khodorkovsky? We think so.

NOTE: Scientists havenow proventhat the Neanderthals lasted in Russia far longer than in any other place. It took them so long because they kept looking under the earth when they should have been looking in the Kremlin.

NOTE: A major tennis tournament was held inMadrid, Spain the first week in May, with $4.5 million in prize money at stake. Shockingly, the 16 seeds included only two Russians, but they were two of the country’s top three in the world: #9 Sharapova and #14 Kuznetsova. Neither even reached the quarter finals. Both were blown off the court by lowly world #28 Domenika Cibulkova in easy straight sets. Cibulkova, hardly in dominant form, then lost her next match, against the very lowest seed in the tournament. Ouch.

Now that “up to 60 percent” of the pupils in the primary schools of the Russian capital are children of migrants who do not speak Russian well, an increasing number of Muscovite parents are doing whatever they can to ensure that their children go to those schools which have few or no migrant children, according to a Moscow newspaper.

Three clergymen from Udmurtia openly criticise Patriarch Kirill and are immediately dismissed from their service.

The event itself was unprecedented: three priests from the Izhevsk and Udmurtia Diocese recorded a video appeal to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia in which they openly criticised the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for the love certain members of the clergy entertain toward luxury, for openly flirting with the wealthy, for the Church’s blind following of the secular authorities, and for much, much more. And they make it known that until the patriarch repents before God and before the people, they will cease to commemorate him during church services.

“Russia is faced with ruin, the main cause of which is a spiritual/moral disaster,” exclaim the clergymen, going on to inquire, “Might it not be that along with the restoration of Orthodox churches, a time of rebirth in the Russian government, army, culture, and family did not take place because the vices of seventy years of Bolshevik subjugation were never dealt with in the church itself?”

Supposing that Russia suffers from difficulties in political and public life, Father Sergei, Father Mikhail and Father Alexander have asked the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church to “cease this shameful practice of blindly following the government and flirting with the wealthy…” In their appeal to the patriarch, they become more specific in their criticism. “We ask most resolutely that you, Your Holiness, see to it that your people witness you exposing representatives of the government and not only blessing and kissing them.”

It is not an easy thing to make such an appeal. Before reading the text on camera, Father Mikhail said, “Overcoming our fear, we turn to the Holy Patriarch for the sake of the Church, for the sake of Russia.”

Fear has not fundamentally changed since the times of “Bolshevik subjugation”. And after reading the text, Father Sergei remarked, “A great deal of priests are keeping silent. They are afraid of losing their parishes, their daily bread…”

It is quite possible that the three priests from Udmurtia were simply speaking what has been on the minds of many. “It is impossible for us not to be upset by the great ease with which church decorations, the orders of saints, are being handed out to representatives of business and government. One simply wonders: what order in the Russian Orthodox Church would be awarded to King Herod? For as we know, he did much for the building and adorning of the Temple in Jerusalem”.

In addition, it raises issues regarding the Moscow Patriarchate’s willingness to use and be used by an increasingly authoritarian regime.

This church-state partnership contributes to the secularism that it contends corrupts and undermines society. Ironically, it is the blurring of the church-state separation that led the Moscow Patriarchate to support an inept, corrupt, and highly dysfunctional autocracy that contributed to the Russian Revolution. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church is heavily subsidized and receives deferential treatment from the current government.

According to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev “Russians are the largest people in Russia, the Russian language is the official language. The Russian Orthodox Church is the biggest confession in our country.” He added that “We should develop the best features of the Russian character that have made our country strong, essentially created it – tolerance, outgoingness, ability to coexist with neighbors, self-confidence, well-known magnanimity, open-mindedness towards our own history and the history of other peoples.” He seems to have overlooked Russia’s history of ruthless territorial expansion.

Internationally, Russia has been repeatedly criticized for a “religious freedom” that elevates Orthodoxy at the expense of all other faiths and Christian denominations. Religious equality has never existed in Russia during the Imperial, Communist, or now in the post-Soviet period. Spiritually and theologically it should raise the question – what is the Moscow-Patriarchate afraid of?

In 2010, Mischa Thompson, U.S. Mission representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) for Freedom of Religion told a gathering that “… in Russia, a regional court can declare a religious text to be extremist, resulting in a nationwide ban on the material.” Anyone caught reading or distributing the material can face imprisonment for up to three years. Thompson further noted that “unwarranted and illegal police raids on places of worship” are not uncommon.

Last year, religious properties in Kaliningrad once belonging to Catholics and Lutherans, but confiscated by the Communists, were given to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate has been accused of lobbying on behalf of businesses. According to the news agency Ukrayinska Pravda, it intervened to increase the grain export quota for one company. Metropolitan Volodymyr, head of Russian controled church, is quoted from a letter urging Prime Minister Mykola Azarov to do it because his church needed more money. In another case, the Metropolitan asked the government to appoint a “vodka businesswoman” to the Cabinet of Ministers.

Historically, the Russian Orthodox Church contributed to the moral legitimacy of an inept, corrupt autocracy more concerned about excess and self-preservation than serving the empire’s multi-ethnic citizens. The Church, especially in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, fostered and contributed to a violent revolution by losing its way.

It ignored and encouraged anti-Semitism, blessed pointless wars, opposed political reforms that would decentralize power, and found excuses for industrial exploitation and the greed of unbridled capitalism. In addition, widespread documentation exists that it was complicit with Communist bosses to survive as an institution.

In 2011, its behavior parallels its past. Lessons have not been learned. There should be a separation of church and state so that a “holy” institution is never compromised by political secularism. Instead, Russian Orthodoxy is considered the unofficial state religion in a country increasingly sliding toward authoritarianism. The Church cannot help halt and turn back this unfortunate development because it is part of the problem.

Forgotten by Russian Orthodoxy then and now is when Satan offered Jesus power, control, and influence over the world.

Lucifer took Jesus “up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed” Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to” Jesus, “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.”

“Away with you, Satan!” Jesus said, “For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God,’ ” and only the Creator “will be served” (Matthew 4:11). The Russian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate seems to have accepted Satan’s invitation. It attempts to make Ukraine one of its secular kingdoms.

Russia and Belorussia are plagued by xenophobia, degrees of increasing authoritarianism, legitimized by a complacent and at times complicit Russian Orthodox Church that is fundamentally opposed to individualism. It prefers a collective or community approach managed by a select few.

Russia and Belorussia have replaced autocracy and Communism with a different breed of masters. In each case the Russian Orthodox Church has been a willing participant.

Members of the middle class, including both entrepreneurs and intellectuals on whom the future of democratic development in the Russian Federation depends, are now fleeting that country in ever-increasing numbers, a trend that both testifies to Russia’s current problems and casts a shadow over its future.

In the current issue of the Moscow weekly “New Times,” Natalya Alyarinskaya and Dmitry Dokuchayev report that according to Russian officials, 1.25 million Russians, “chiefly businessmen and representatives of the middle class,” have left the country over the last three years.

Their departure, the two journalists say, is “almost as large as the first which took place after the October coup in 1917 when about two million people left” Russia. And the devote the remainder of their article to exploring the answers as to “why these people are leaving Russia and whether it is possible to stop this exodus?”

The findings of a recent poll by the Levada Center showing that 50 percent of Russians “dream of leaving the country,” including “two thirds [of those] under 35,” and that “63 percent of those questioned would like their children to study and work abroad” rather than in their homeland.

But those findings, which express interest and desire rather than action, have now been made even more a matter of concern by other data. Vladimir Gruzdyev, a Duma deputy of the ruling United Russia Party said that in 2010, “the number of individual entrepreneurs dropped from 4.61 to 4.11 million,” with most of the half million not only leaving business but Russia.

Igor Nikolayev, the head of strategic prognostications for FBK suggests that this statistic “should be increased by a factor of two if not three.” The reason? “Many people keep their citizenship and apartment in Russia, and although their entire family has been living in the West for a long time, they do not fall within the emigration statistics.”

Kyiv urged to declare 1944 deportation of Crimean tatars an act of genocide

Today at 19:23 | Paul Goble

The Georgian parliament’s decision last week to declare the Russian repression of the Circassians 150 years ago a genocide, a decision that has infuriated Moscow, could have a far broader impact than even its critics have suggested.

Eighty-five years ago yesterday, on May 25, 1926, while walking on rue Racine in Paris, not far from boulevard Saint-Michel, Ottoman Symon Petliura was approached by a known Bolshevik, Sholom Schwartzbard. The French Secret service had been keeping an eye out on Schwartzbard from the time he had surfaced in the French capital and had noted his meetings with known Bolsheviks in Paris.

Schwartzbard asked him in Ukrainian, “Are you Mr. Petliura?” Petliura did not answer, only raised his walking cane. Then as Schwartzbard claimed in court he pulled out a gun and shot him five times. Some state the there were two more after he was lying on the ground.

Later it would surface that the German special services informed their French counterparts that Schwartzbard had assassinated Petlura on the orders of the head of the Soviet Ukrainian government, Christian Rakovsky, an ethnic Bulgarian and a revolutionary leader from Romania. The Russian NKVD would later confirm their part in ordering the killing the president-in-exile of a free Ukrainian state.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A sensational dispute between Moscow billionaires with a storyline that rivals Hollywood has spilled across international borders: Surveillance photographs showed a fugitive Russian lawmaker living in Beverly Hills, California. Someone tried to hack into computers at his London law firm. And he filed a federal lawsuit in New York accusing his business rivals of trying to force him to return home.

After Zalmayev contacted them, several other rights activists in the U.S. and Russia also wrote letters opposing granting Egiazaryan asylum.

They later withdrew their letters after personal appeals from Egiazaryan’s friends in Moscow, saying they didn’t have all the information in the case.

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